Earthquake Information

On March 11 the Tohoku region of Japan was hit by a massive earthquake which caused a tsunami and problems with several nuclear plants. Despite lasting damage to afflicted areas, the venue city of Kyoto is located far from the epicenter and was not directly affected. We therefore do not expect the conference to be affected by this tragic disaster.

Conference Poster

Conference News

Following the Kyoto conference, student presenters were asked to submit papers on the 'Past, Present and Future of Language Evolution Research' for compilation as part of a peer-reviewed student volume for distribution at the next conference. The volume has finally been published, as is now available for download here:

In Kyoto Celia Alba and Oriol Borrega conducted interviews with a number of participants asking what they considered "is the single most important advance in the field in the last few years?" The video is of these interviews is now online with answers from Cedric Boeckx, Simon Kirby, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Kazuo Okanoya, Simon Fisher, Anna Maria di Sciullo, Antonio Benítez-Burraco, Charles Yang, Lluís Barceló i Coblijn, Koji Fujita, Víctor Longa, Jenny Saffran, Aritz Irurtzun, Joana Rosselló, Mauricio Martins, Bart de Boer, Denis Bouchard, Russell Gray, and James Hurford.

Research excellence was again reflected by the breadth and depth of oral and poster research presentations at this year’s conference. The Interaction Studies Award is awarded to the presenter of the best poster research presentation at the conference. This year’s winners were Dr. Rishiraj Saha Roy, Dr. Monojit Choudhury, and Dr. Kalika Bali. Dr. Roy for their highly innovative study "Are Web Search Queries an Evolving Protolanguage?".

The Hurford Prize is awarded to the presenter of the best student oral presentation at EVOLANG IX. The winner is Ms. Tessa Verhoef. She won the prize for her excellent and stimulating presentation of "Holistic or Synthetic Protolanguage: Evidence from Iterated Learning of Whistled Signals", co-authored with Dr. Bart de Boer and Dr. Simon Kirby.

The conference has finally come to an end, and on behalf of the Local Organizing Committee, I would like to express our gratitude to all those who were able to join us in Kyoto this last week. The conference was not without its problems, but the general opinion seems to be that it was a success. The credit for this is shared between all of those involved, but in large part goes to the diverse range of participants who attended.

This website will continue to be updated over the next few months, and will eventually host links to both a volume of student papers and to videos of a number of the plenary lectures. Participants will be notified when these become available. Also following a request at the business meeting we will also be adding a list of all participants to make it easier for people to track down people they met during the conference. This will be uploaded in a couple of weeks as we will need to give people the option of opting out if they do not wish to be included.

For those of you who will be staying in Japan for a few days, we would like to once again extend an invitation to join us this Monday for the Tokyo Evolutionary Linguistics Forum which is being hosted by the University of Tokyo. No registration is required, so if you happen to be in Tokyo please stop by.

And finally, a reminder to mark 14-17 April 2014 in your calendar so you can join us for EvolangX in Vienna, Austria!

For our international participants we thought it best to give an update on the weather here in Japan. We have been having a colder March than is usual and this is predicted to continue during the conference. There is also a reasonably high likelihood of showers throughout the conference period. A long range Kyoto weather forecast is available here.